Information About EIGRP Wide Metrics

EIGRP Composite Cost Metrics

The Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) uses bandwidth, delay, reliability, load, and K values (various constants that can be configured by a user to produce varying routing behaviors) to calculate the composite cost metric for local Routing Information Base (RIB) installation and route selections. The EIGRP composite cost metric is calculated using the following formula:

EIGRP uses one or more vector metrics to calculate the composite cost metric. The table below lists EIGRP vector metrics and their descriptions.

Table 1 EIGRP Vector Metrics

Vector Metric

Description

bandwidth

The minimum bandwidth (Bw) of the route, in kilobits per second. It can be 0 or any positive integer. The bandwidth for the formula is scaled and inverted by using the following formula:

Scaled Bw = (107/minimum bandwidth (Bw) in kilobits per second)

delay

Route delay, in tens of microseconds.

Scaled Delay = (Delay/10)

load

The effective load of the route, expressed as a number from 0 to 255 (255 is 100 percent loading).

mtu

The minimum maximum transmission unit (MTU) size of the route, in bytes. It can be 0 or any positive integer.

reliability

The likelihood of successful packet transmission, expressed as a number between 0 and 255, where 255 means 100 percent reliability and 0 means no reliability.

EIGRP monitors metric weights, by using K values, on an interface to allow the tuning of EIGRP metric calculations and to indicate the type of service (ToS). K values are integers from 0 to 128; these integers, in conjunction with variables like bandwidth and delay, are used to calculate the overall EIGRP composite cost metric. The table below lists the K values and their defaults.

Table 2 EIGRP K-Value Defaults

Setting

Default Value

K1

1

K2

0

K3

1

K4

0

K5

0

Although you can configure K values to produce varying routing behaviors, most configurations use only the delay and bandwidth metrics by default, with bandwidth taking precedence, to produce a single 32-bit metric. Use of the default constants effectively reduces the above-mentioned composite cost metric formula to the following default formula: 256*(Scaled Bw + Scaled Delay).

For example, let us consider a link whose bandwidth to a particular destination is 128 kb/s and the delay is 84,000 microseconds. By using the default formula, you can simplify the EIGRP composite cost metric calculation to 256*(Scaled Bw + Scaled Delay), thus resulting in the following value:

Metric = 256*(107/128 + 84000/10) = 256*86525 = 22150400

EIGRP Wide Metrics

The Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) composite cost metric (calculated using the bandwidth, delay, reliability, load, and K values) is not scaled correctly for high-bandwidth interfaces or Ethernet channels, resulting in incorrect or inconsistent routing behavior. The lowest delay that can be configured for an interface is 10 microseconds. As a result, high-speed interfaces, such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) interfaces, or high-speed interfaces channeled together (GE ether channel) will appear to EIGRP as a single GE interface. This may cause undesirable equal-cost load balancing. To resolve this issue, the EIGRP Wide Metrics feature supports 64-bit metric calculations and Routing Information Base (RIB) scaling that provide the ability to support interfaces (either directly or via channeling techniques like port channels or ether channels) up to approximately 4.2 terabits.

To accommodate interfaces with bandwidths above 1 gigabit and up to 4.2 terabits and to allow EIGRP to perform path selections, the EIGRP composite cost metric formula is modified. The paths are selected based on the computed time. The time that information takes to travel through links is measured in picoseconds. The interfaces can be directly capable of these high speeds, or the interfaces can be bundles of links with an aggregate bandwidth greater than 1 gigabit.

The EIGRP Wide Metrics feature also introduces K6 as an additional K value for future use.

By default, the path selection scheme used by EIGRP is a combination of throughput (rate of data transfer) and latency (time taken for data transfer), and the formula for calculating the composite cost metric is as follows:

With the calculation of larger bandwidths, EIGRP can no longer fit the computed metric into a 4-byte unsigned long value that is needed by the Cisco RIB. To set the RIB scaling factor for EIGRP, use the
metric rib-scale command. When you configure the
metric rib-scale command, all EIGRP routes in the RIB are cleared and replaced with the new metric values.

EIGRP Metric Weights

You can use the
metricweights command to adjust the default behavior of Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) routing and metric computations. EIGRP metric defaults (K values) have been carefully selected to provide optimal performance in most networks.

Note

Adjusting EIGRP metric weights can dramatically affect network performance. Because of the complexity of this task, we recommend that you do not change the default K values without guidance from an experienced network designer.

By default, the EIGRP composite cost metric is a 32-bit quantity that is the sum of segment delays and the lowest segment bandwidth (scaled and inverted) for a given route. The formula used to scale and invert the bandwidth value is 107/minimum bandwidth in kilobits per second. However, with the EIGRP Wide Metrics feature, the EIGRP composite cost metric is scaled to include 64-bit metric calculations for EIGRP named mode configurations.

For a network of homogeneous media, this metric reduces to a hop count. For a network of mixed media (FDDI, Gigabit Ethernet (GE), and serial lines running from 9600 bits per second to T1 rates), the route with the lowest metric reflects the most desirable path to a destination.

Mismatched K Values

EIGRP K values are the metrics that EIGRP uses to calculate routes. Mismatched K values can prevent neighbor relationships from being established and can negatively impact network convergence. The example given below explains this behavior between two EIGRP peers (Device-A and Device-B).

The following configuration is applied to Device-A. The K values are changed using the
metricweights command. A value of 2 is entered for the
k1 argument to adjust the bandwidth calculation. A value of 1 is entered for the
k3 argument to adjust the delay calculation.

The following are two scenarios where the above error message can be displayed:

Two devices are connected on the same link and configured to establish a neighbor relationship. However, each device is configured with different K values.

One of two peers has transmitted a “peer-termination” message (a message that is broadcast when an EIGRP routing process is shut down), and the receiving device does not support this message. The receiving device will interpret this message as a K-value mismatch.

Technical Assistance

Description

Link

The Cisco Support and Documentation website provides online resources to download documentation, software, and tools. Use these resources to install and configure the software and to troubleshoot and resolve technical issues with Cisco products and technologies. Access to most tools on the Cisco Support and Documentation website requires a Cisco.com user ID and password.

Feature Information for EIGRP
Wide Metrics

The following table provides release information about the feature or features described in this module. This table lists only the software release that introduced support for a given feature in a given software release train. Unless noted otherwise, subsequent releases of that software release train also support that feature.

Use Cisco Feature Navigator to find information about platform support and Cisco software image support. To access Cisco Feature Navigator, go to
www.cisco.com/​go/​cfn. An account on Cisco.com is not required.

The following
commands were introduced or modified by this feature:
metric
rib-scale,metric
weights, show eigrp address-family
neighbors,
show eigrp address-family
topology,
show eigrp
plugins,
show eigrp
protocols,
show eigrp
tech-support,
show ip eigrp
neighbors, and
show ip eigrp
topology.